President Obama’s plan for a hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan risks squandering the hard-won gains made on the battlefield in southern Afghanistan over the last ten months. U.S. military commanders on the ground in Afghanistan had reportedly requested a slower pace of withdrawal to afford them the opportunity to consolidate recent gains against Taliban insurgents. President Obama has denied his military commanders flexibility to determine the pace and scope of withdrawal based on conditions on the ground, and instead appears to have based his decision largely around the …
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Yet another newly revealed flaw of Obamacare promises to add billions to the cost of the new health law. Due to what was presumably an oversight in the drafting of the legislation, it could potentially unload 24.7 million additional Americans onto the Medicaid program. That’s 50 percent higher than the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) original projection of 16 million. As Medicare Actuary Richard Foster explained in testimony before the House Budget Committee, the definition of income to determine eligibility excludes Social Security benefits, allowing couples in early retirement who …
In a new Heritage in Focus, Heritage research assistant Emily Goff discusses our 2011 Budget Chart Book which shows in vivid detail the severity of America’s spending crisis. Listen to the full interview here. In this podcast, Goff offers solutions to prevent us from worsening our fiscal situation. In addition, she tackles other burning questions about today’s budget: What was the most surprising thing she found? Is it true, as the left argues, that taxes must be raised to fix our fiscal situation? And what is contributing most heavily to …
Shell spent five years and more than $3.5 billion while waiting for the Environmental Protection Agency to grant a permit for drilling in Alaska. Now lawmakers in Congress hope to force the hand of EPA bureaucrats by mandating a six-month deadline to review permit applications. The Jobs and Energy Permitting Act is set for a House vote Thursday and is expected to easily pass with bipartisan support. The White House declined to issue a veto threat Tuesday. There is a companion bill in the Senate, but its fate is uncertain. …
On June 20, the government of Belize expropriated the 70 percent ownership interest in the Belize Electric Company (BEL) held by the shareholder-owned, Canada-based energy giant Fortis. Belize Electric Company Limited (BECOL), a hydroelectric business that Fortis also owns, has not been expropriated—yet. Fortis has invested more than $400 million in Belize. BEL is insolvent and $27 million in debt. BEL officials blame the insolvency on the government of Prime Minister Dean Barrow, saying they were forced to sell electricity in Belize at rates lower than the cost to acquire …
Once delivering 2.1 million barrels of oil a day to the United States, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, one of the world’s largest pipeline systems, now carries about one-third of that. Although the pipeline collects oil from several fields, falling production in those fields could eventually cause the pipeline to shut down. If the flow falls below a certain level—estimates vary from 350,000 barrels per day to 200,000 barrels per day—cold temperatures can cause ice buildup and corrosion. The real question, though, is how to meet America’s energy needs. One way to …
Today’s release of the 2011 Long-Term Budget Outlook by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) yet again confirms what we already know: America’s budget is continuing down an unsustainable path, and the longer we wait to address this problem, the more painful the policy fixes will have to be. The CBO presents its results under two sets of assumptions, and while the assumptions differ, the bottom line result is the same: Spending continues to spiral out of control and the increase in the nation’s debt would be catastrophic. Under the more …
On Sunday, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) had a stark message for the GOP candidates on ABC’s This Week: “We cannot move into [becoming] an isolationist party. We cannot repeat the lessons of the 1930s when the United States of America stood by while bad things happened in the world.” Senator McCain is correct that Americans should not withdraw from the world in response to the active internationalism of recent years.
While economic growth remains sluggish, the last thing the United States needs is another weight holding it back. Unfortunately, the new health care subsidy program created under Obamacare for low- and middle-income Americans does precisely that. In recent research, Heritage’s Paul Winfree lays out exactly how the Obamacare subsidies will negatively impact the economy. According to Winfree, “tax subsidies are available for certain households who purchase federally approved coverage in the newly created state health insurance exchanges…unless they are eligible for Medicare or Medicaid or they can receive coverage through …
